A retired RCMP officer-turned-gun-trafficker has been found guilty of possessing an arsenal of illegal weapons that included machine guns and anti-personnel landmines, but he might receive a vastly reduced sentence after a judge found police violated his rights by illegally detaining him for more than two weeks without laying any charges.

David Alan Kift, author of the tell-all police memoir The Naked Mountie, had sought to have the weapons charges he was facing stayed, but a judge rejected that request, finding the firearms charges he faced were too serious for such a drastic remedy. However, the judge did find that she could remedy the serious rights violation by the Ontario Provincial Police and Durham Regional Police by not considering statements Kift made to police following his arrest and by giving him a reduced sentence.

Kift, 57, was convicted of nearly five dozen charges.

A police search of Kift’s cottage near Bancroft turned up 67 prohibited, restricted and unrestricted firearms. The guns included a semi-automatic AK-47, several fully and semi-automatic Sten machine guns, an M-16, a fully automatic Russian sub-machine gun, five handguns, homemade zip guns, antique guns, a small cannon, silencers, and prohibited magazines capable of holding larger amounts of ammunition. One of the guns was used in a suicide.

Spring-activated knives, crossbows and smoke grenades were also found, along with police badges and an RCMP warrant card.

Many of the firearms were concealed behind a closet wall in a main floor bedroom. Gas canisters filled with thousands of rounds of ammunition were hidden behind a false wall in the master bedroom closet. More guns and ammunition were found in a secret compartment in a work bench in the garage.

The serial numbers had been drilled and ground off on some of the guns, including the AK47.

At the time, Kift was on parole from a five-year sentence he received in 2008 for trafficking guns to the reputed top enforcer of a slain mob boss.

Kift’s lawyer, Michael Johnston, had argued that the “vile” police conduct included holding Kift without taking him to court or even telling him the charges he was facing, even as they held a press conference where they showed off the guns and explosives they seized during a March 2013 search. Kift and his wife, Marion, had both been arrested after being ordered out of bed as police officers waited outside with their guns drawn.

The trouble for police was their mistaken belief that they didn’t need to charge Kift or give him an explanation since he was a federal parole violator and would remain in custody regardless of whether he was criminally charged. Kift’s parole was revoked and he ended up spending another six months in prison as a result of the parole apprehension warrant, but that didn’t excuse the police for their failure to promptly bring Kift to court.

Kift, who suffers from post traumatic stress disorder after watching a fellow officer die on duty, was supposed to be brought before a justice of the peace within 24 hours. He was made to wait 15 days because police didn’t believe they’d have time to interview him before a bail hearing.

“Taking Mr. Kift for a bail hearing would have resulted in Mr. Kift being out of reach of police investigators who wanted to interview him,” wrote the judge.

The police took a “cavalier and utilitarian approach” to Kift’s rights, the judge concluded.

“The police believed, wrongly, that the apprehension warrant relieved them of their obligations,” wrote Ontario Court Justice Elaine Deluzio in her decision Tuesday. “They calculated to deprive Mr. Kift of his liberty to facilitate their investigation without the need for his arrest, so that Mr. Kift would be denied the constitutional protection that arrest entails.”

Police interrogated him three times, including an hour-long off-camera interview. The judge questioned whether his willingness to volunteer a statement might have been overridden by an inducement of leniency for his wife in exchange for confidential information about criminal associates. Kift confessed during the third interview, but the Crown didn’t seek to rely on the confession since it might not have been voluntary.

Allowing police to sidestep arresting and charging Kift by relying on parole revocation to keep him in custody while they continued to investigate means Charter and other legal rights could be undermined for any parolee.

“By design, of course, parolees have less liberty than the rest of us,” wrote the judge. “But this does not mean that the legal and constitutional rights they do have can be compromised in this way.”

Kift’s illegal detention appears to be the longest on record. Neither the Crown nor defence could find a case where someone was held in jail without charge for as long as he was.

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